A Survey of Human-Computer Interaction Technology in Intelligent Home for Children's Learning

The development of the COVID-19 epidemic has increased the home learning time of children. More researchers began to pay attention to children's learning in home. This survey reviewed the frontier and classic cases in the field of interactive design of children's home learning in the past five years, analyzed tangible user interface, augmented reality, and multimodal interaction in human-computer interaction of children's home learning. This paper reviewed the application of interactive system in children's learning and points out its positive side in development of ability, process of learning, habits of learning, and environment of learning of children. Through analysis, we advise that it is necessary to create home learning applications, link smart home systems, and build an interactive learning environment for smart home learning environment design. Finally, we point out the technical and ethical problems existing in the current research, proposes that intelligent perception, emotion recognition, and expression technologies should be introduced in the future, and looks forward to the development of this field. © 2023 Institute of Computing Technology. All rights reserved.

Understanding Children's Drawings as Sociomaterial Assemblages of Voice during Pandemic Times

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools transitioned to online learning. Utilizing sociomaterial assemblages and visual methods alongside interviews to prompt children's voices, we collected drawings from primary students at two Eastern Canadian schools to achieve a multimodal understanding of children's online learning experiences. Younger children's drawings reflected the issues with technology and lack of socialization, while older children's depicted their enjoyment with online learning with the agency afforded by learning from home. We found that pedagogical creativity and innovation were essential to successful online learning. This research demonstrates the efficacy of a sociomaterial perspective on children's drawings for eliciting children's agentic voices.

Indonesian children's voices of the school-from-home policy

This study analyzes Indonesian children's happiness feeling and preferences toward school-from-home activities and setting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Online interviews and drawing-telling activities were used to obtain the data from 334 children aged four to six years. The findings revealed that more than half of the children were happy with the school-from-home policy. They stated that they were allowed to conduct unstructured free play at home besides completing the assignments from the teachers. Older children, 6 years old, preferred the school setting, as they could get themselves engaged in social interaction with their surroundings. In conclusion, adults should consider children's voices, as part of an effort in enhancing their academic well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Smart Assistive 3D Tool to Remedy Children's Learning Difficulties for Distance Education

COVID-19 has accelerated the shift away from the traditional classroom to online learning around the globe. Despite its advantages, students could not easily adapt to the challenges of transition overnight. To remedy academic difficulties that arise with online education, this paper introduces an assistive 3D educational tool for slow learners in elementary school, mainly for Arabic, English, and Math subjects. The proposed tool can be fully integrated with remedial programs to help students who could not adapt to distance learning during the pandemic, slow learners, or even students who cannot attain school. This tool automatically adapts to students' weaknesses and classifies students based on academic performance rather than age. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-use interface for teachers to customize it using their own content and game scenarios. © 2022 IEEE.

Insights about Helpful Covid-19 Learning Resources from Caregivers of Elementary School Children

Media resources are a central component of children's learning ecologies in the U.S. However, much of the coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic came through channels for adult audiences, and the "infodemic” added to the difficulty of interpreting information from media sources. This paper analyzes learning resources collected in a diary study conducted with 109 families with elementary school aged children at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Findings show that the resources caregivers found useful in communicating with their children about the pandemic are intertwined with their life experiences and interpretation of their children's information needs. © ISLS.

Reimagining Collaboration in Family-School Partnerships

Drawing on an equitable collaboration framework (Ishimaru, 2019), this study examines how teachers and families collaborated virtually to support children's' learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study was part of a research practice partnership with 31 teachers and their students across 14 schools in a large urban school district in California. Case study analyses of teacher and caregiver interviews reveal four dimensions of effective family-school partnerships: 1) having the "classroom in the living room,” 2) open strengths-based communication, 3) social and emotional support, and 4) active partnership. Furthermore, family-school partnerships led to positive outcomes including greater windows into children's learning and empathy between families and teachers. This work has significant implications for how families and schools can move forward to leverage these practices to have more equitable, collaborative, and authentic family-school partnerships in distance learning and beyond. © 2022 International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). All rights reserved.

How does parental involvement matter for children's academic achievement during school closure in primary school?

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has infected over twenty million people across 200 countries. UNESCO claimed that more than 190 countries had implemented countrywide school closures, which resulted in preventing 1.6 billion students of their classroom learning opportunities. As children are unable to study in the classroom with teachers' supervision, the importance of parental engagement is amplified in children's learning at home. AIM: The primary purpose of the present study was to investigate how parental involvement contribute to children's academic achievement during school closure. SAMPLE: Two hundred and twenty-nine primary school children and their parents. METHOD: Children's academic achievement before (T1) and after school closure (T3), parental involvement (T2) and children's learning engagement (T2) during school closure were measured. RESULTS: After controlling for gender, age, grade and SES, children's learning engagement (T2) served as a full mediator of the association between parental involvement (T2) and children's academic achievement from T1 to T3. Moreover, parental psychological control (T2) moderated the association between parental involvement (T2) and children's learning engagement (T2). Specifically, the contribution of parental involvement to children's learning engagement became stronger for children whose parents had higher levels of psychological control. Higher Chinese parental psychological control did not always correlate to lower academic outcomes in the context of COVID-19. CONCLUSION: These findings highlight the central roles of parental involvement and children's learning engagement in children's academic achievement during school closure caused by COVID-19.

Integration of Two Unique Senior Design Projects to Engineering Technology

This paper presents two unique senior design projects that were completed in a B.S. in Engineering Technology program. The first project's objective was to design and build a ladder activity board (LAB) to experimentally measure and diagnose special-needs children's learning skills. The LAB is developed to make physical therapist offices more time conscious and productive. The LAB has a dimension of 2'4”x1'6” and it is expected to keep the attention of children at their physical therapy diagnostics. The board is installed on a ladder system allowing it to be adjusted for each patient's height. The activities that are installed on the board are expected to help children to learn basic shapes, colors, and voices of different objects and animals that are built by basic mechanical and electrical circuits. The LAB can be considered as an easy alternative for child development needs. The purpose is to have access to multiple safe exercises all in one product. The LAB is a product that will be used in a physical therapy office and could be purchased for the child to perform their physical therapy at home. In the times of COVID-19, this product will help families that cannot go into their physical therapist's office. The final product is made from plywood with plastic features printed in 3D-printers in the engineering technology department. The electrical components stimulating animal sounds and LED lights are installed on the panel in the back of the board. The functional block diagram, 3D-design of the overall LAB system, the flow chart that how the LAB operates, and the related Gantt chart of the project will be reported in the full paper. The LAB will be helping physical therapists to save time in the process of diagnosing and keeping track of a child's progress. The board will also help the child learn cognitive skills such as recognizing colors, shapes and animals and entertain them while progressing in their physical therapy and special education settings. The second senior design project reported in this paper is design and production of a temporary to semi-permanent solution for a replacement leg for a general canine. The need has been demonstrated by a pet dog who has lost a leg. The goal of this second senior project is to design and 3D-print a prosthetic that can be used as an artificial leg for the animal. If the animal is still growing this project will help to design and build a product that can be either scaled, adjusted for a better fit, or different sizes as the dog develops. The other main goal of this project is to use easily accessible materials other than the 3D-filament that is not available to the public. To achieve this goal, students only used the materials that can be found in big box stores such as Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. Students working on this project were very excited about enabling a pet to become fully ambulatory. It is expected that this project will serve as a reference work for many canine owners to be able to help their own pets by using easy design and 3D-manufacturing techniques rather than time consuming and expensive traditional leg replacement methods. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021